Not hours; but days instead of months: porting around 30k lines of legacy livescript project to typescript. Most of the work is in tweaking a prompt for Claude (using Aider) so the porting process is done correctly.

Thankfully it seems like AI is best at automating the most tedious and arguably most useless endeavor in software engineering- rewriting perfectly good code in whatever the language du jour is.

Again, what AI is good at shows the revealed preferences of the training data, so it does make sense that it would excel at pointless rewrites.

Legacy code in a dynamically typed language is never good.

Use Undermind to gather a literature review of a field adjacent to the one you’re working in but with a wealth of information that you don’t yet know.

Use OpenAI to convert a few thousand lines of code from a language you're familiar with to one you’re not, as all the state-of-the-art tools in the field above use that language. Debug all the issues that arise from the impedance mismatch between the languages. Recreate the results from the seminal paper in the field to verify that the code works, and run it on your own problem. Write a stream-of-consciousness post without spell-checking, then throw it into GPT and ask it to fix it.